[The future of the telephone will mean] . . . nothing less than a reorganisation
of society – a state of things in which every individual, however
secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community, to
the saving of no end of social and business complications, of needless
goings to and fro, of disappointments, delays, and a countless host of
great and little evils and annoyances which go so far under present conditions
to make life laborious and unsatisfactory.
Scientific American (1880: 16)
That’s a funny kind of thing, in which each new object becomes the
occasion for seeing again what we see anywhere; seeing people’s nastinesses
or goodnesses and all the rest, when they do this initially technical
job of talking over the phone. The technical apparatus is, then, being
made at home with the rest of our world. And that’s a thing that’s routinely
being done, and it’s the source for the failures of technocratic
dreams that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication
machine the world will be transformed. Where what happens is that the
object is made at home in the world that has whatever organisation it
already has. Sacks (1972 (1992): 548)